Product DescriptionAfter his mother’s suicide, Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke wanted to set down what he knew, or could say, about her life and the causes of her death before "the dull speechlessness ... the extreme speechlessness" of grief took hold forever. The result is an unsparing, deeply moving elegy in which writing keeps vigil at the limits of language, understanding, and life. This is a haunting memoir of a family tragedy by one of the most acclaimed — and controversial —contemporary writers whose style has been compared to Flaubert, Hemingway, and DeLillo. "Moving and beautifully realized." — The New York Times Book Review ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

A lacerating yet loving account of a life; like no other I know
"The Sunday edition of the Kärnter Volkszeitung carried the following item under 'Local News': 'In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.'"

That's the opening of Peter Handke's 96-page account about the suicide of his mother. It takes perhaps an hour to read. But like the best of Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams stays with you, both as an example of great writing and, even more, as a chronicle of a representative German life.

Handke is not widely known in America, which may be just as well --- he has always courted controversy and taken unpopular positions. In 1966, when he was just 24, he achieved the kind of reaction that only a few playwrights crave; during a performance of his play ''Offending the Audience,'' theatergoers actually become so infuriated that they rushed the stage. The next year, at a conference at Princeton University, he accused Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll of writing "mere description'' about social issues. In 1996, he wrote that Western media demonized the Serbs during the Balkan War. And in 2006, at the funeral of Slobodan Milosaevic,Handke spoke --- in Serbian --- in support of the man whom many regard as a war criminal.

Long before his recent unpopularity, Handke was the Bright Young Man of German writing. "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams", written in two months in 1972, is the best argument for that exalted reputation. Ironically, it's not a literary document. It's a horror story, pure and simple.

Handke's mother --- he never gives her a name --- grew up happy. Her father had done what no peasant in his family had managed: He owned a house. He saved prodigiously, lost his money in the inflation of the 1920s; he scrimped again, only to lose his money in the Depression. Still, his daughter was "high-spirited", an attractive girl with no sense that adulthood for uneducated women was a crushing series of reduced expectations.

So Handke's mother didn't see World War II as a nightmare; for her, it was an adventure that broke the bonds of her limited world. ("'We were kind of excited,' my mother told me. 'For the first time, people did things together.'") She met a married soldier, became pregnant (with Peter), then sealed her fate with a marriage to a soldier she didn't love. Another child followed. And a self-administered abortion.

Her life was split; she had "a certain chic", but couldn't find a way to express it fully. And then, after the war, the "speechless moments of terror" begin. The husband drank. Which led to wife-beating. She kept silent, she "had learned her place."

Poverty ground her down. I'll spare you the account, which is exactingly described --- it's real poverty, not the movie kind.Handke struggles to remember the big things, the important things, but what he mostly finds is small, and all the sadder for smallness: "From her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held onto it when I walked beside her."

It's not a straight trip to the bottom. There's a sudden, final flowering. "My mother had not been crushed for good," Handke reports. She began to read, took an interest in politics. "She learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her."

It was too late. An animal despair overwhelmed her, sank her; her sorrow was so deep no one could rescue her. When he heard of her suicide, Handke writes that he was "beside myself with pride" --- she'd found a way out.

And so he began to evoke her life:

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her . . . dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide."

He does get beyond "dull speechlessness". But can a writer who sees himself as a writing machine break through to his true feelings? Will he get beyond the standard emotions to communicate the horror of a thwarted life? How, in the end, does a son tell the story of a mother whose only triumph may have been her death?

No account I have ever read of a woman's life by her child deals with such questions. "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" stands alone.

A unique but overly abstracted biography
In 1972, the author's mother took her own life by overdosing on sleeping pills, after an unremarkable life of 51 years that was marred by poverty, depression, neurogenic pain, and especially the limited opportunities available to her. After the initial "dull speechlessness" he experienced after receiving the news of her death, Handke was proud that his mother had taken the affirmative step to end her suffering. Soon afterward, he decided to write about her life, before the need to do so faded away.

The account of her life and demise is unique, in that he chooses to write about her in relation to other women of her era and socioeconomical status. She is born in a small Austrian village to a struggling family, and is described as a high-spirited child and a good student. She is taken out of school by her parents once her compulsory education ends, then runs away to Berlin as a teenager to pursue opportunities that her village and parents cannot offer her. After bearing a child out of wedlock to the love of her life, she agrees to marry a man whom she does not love or respect, in order to provide for herself and her child in post-war Germany. She sinks back into the life that she had sought escape, and ultimately moves back with her family to her home village. In her remaining days she is an embittered woman who frightens her children and is emotionally separated from her emasculated husband, yet she becomes more independent and full of life before developing the chronic pain and depression that ultimately led to her suicide.

I found A Sorrow Beyond Dreams somewhat difficult and less than enjoyable, primarily because of the author's use of abstraction to distance himself from and depersonalize his mother. We only get brief glimpses into her personality, and into what made her unique from other similar women, which would have made this a much more interesting book for me. The book is well written and brief (76 pages), and sufficiently unique that it may be of interest to a limited audience of readers.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Though this purports to be a "holocaust" story, it is a biography of a woman (the writer's mother) who lived during that time but only slightly refers to the events of that period and their impact.It's more of "50's" women's story - the tamped down emotions, the "other-directedness" of the personality.This is mildly interesting but he is straddling his fence as a writer.It is his mother so he is backing off the subject, trying to be objective, but in doing so only gives us broad hints of the real problems in her life.Had it been tied more strongly to specifics of living through the holocaust as an average German woman, it would have had more to say about the mind of that time and how a woman came through that time and on to the rest of her life.

Very Sorrowful
Peter Handke's slim memoir is necessarily sorrowful; it is about his mother's suicide. She was a survivor of the holocaust, and like many survivors, suffered from severe depression in the subsequent years. Handke's tone is cold, removed, and sepulchral. This is a vivid and moving text; it can not be easily categorized. It is non-fiction, but it is composed with the eye of a true artist.

Not a read for everyone, but definitely an impressive effort. It is a testament to the ultimate destruction of Europe during WWII, glimpsed through the microcosm of a single individual.

A Sensitively Valuable Elegy
With thanks to the New York Review Books, Peter Handke's A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS is once again available.This slim but pungent volume opens with an elegant introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides ( author of 'Middlesex' and 'The Virgin Suicides' ) and few writers could better place this memoir of Handke's response to his mother's suicide in 1971 in a more meaningful perspective.

Handke writes about his mother in a way that creates a story rather than a history of a life.There is so much understantding of how the world changed from Pre-WW II through the post war emptiness of a desecrated Europe and its accompanying slow move toward healing that plagues burned countries after victories or defeats signalling the end of wars. Handke's mother remains nameless which serves to make her a more universal figure than just another individual.And using the word 'individual' is actually in contrast to the major problem of this tragic women's life.Always a women of poverty, suffering the cruelties that that station in life suggests (a fatherless child, a marriage of convenience that results in a life with an alcoholic husban, self induced abortions, begging for food, the lack of simple luxuries like Christmas gifts, etc) his mother was not a woman who considered herself an individual: she was a daughter of a postwar poverty and gloom, aligning herself with Socialism which further negated her worth as a unique person.Her gradual withdrawal in yet another group (those with 'nervous breakdowns') overtured her ultimate complete withdrawal from the world as she finds taking her own life the final solution to her grief.

Handke reserves his own response to the loss of his mother until the end of this memoir - a section of memories, flashbacks, regrets and tears that force him to place his final godbyes in the form of the written word.The writing is powerful in its simplicity, unfettered by false emotions, straight forward in forcing both the author and the reader into confronting the tragedy of suicide.Perhaps many readers will use this short tome to find healing of like experiences: others will read this book simply because it is a beautifully constructed story of the life on an Everyman/woman.Highly Recommended.
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Product DescriptionA short, powerful new novel by one of the greatest writers in the German language

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic, novel about one man's conflict with himself and his journey toward resolution. During one night shift, an unnamed, middle-aged pharmacist in Taxham, an isolated suburb of Salzburg, tells his story to a narrator.The pharmacist is known and well-respected, but lonely and estranged from his wife. He feels most comfortable wandering about in nature, collecting and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. One day he receives a blow to the head that leaves him unable to speak, and the narrative is transformed from ironic description into a collection of sensual impressions, observations and reflections. The pharmacist, who is now called the driver, sets out on a quest, travelling into the Alps with two companions--a former Olympic skiing champion and a formerly famous poet--where he is beaten and later stalked by a woman. He drives through a tunnel and has a premonition of death, then finds himself in a surreal, foreign land. In a final series of bizarre, cathartic events, the driver regains his speech and is taken back to his pharmacy--back to his former life, but forever changed. A powerful, poetic exploration of language, longing and dislocation in the human experience, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House reveals Handke at his magical best. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Dream travel for the mushroom enthusiast
I agree. The main review gives a good description and appreciation for this interesting novel. This is the first book by handke that I have read or even known about. I picked it out totally by accident.
I enjoy this style of writing though it is not for everyone. I will certainly seek out other work by him.
The main character is a very lonesome type of individual and the
mushroom fetish is perfect to compliment his personality.
The landscaping and dreamscaping is super as well as the interplay between the travelling characters. Needless to say this is probably a novel that few people are familiar with but I for one am glad to have happened upon such a gifted writer. Translation from German makes it even better.

Isolation Examined
This was a fantastic, albeit somewhat depressing, book.I agree with the other reviewers here.But I would add that the book is a moving exploration of man's ultimate and inherent isolation.

Handke's Characteristic Alchemy
The editorial review here is pretty accurate, insofar as summations can ever do justice to a Handke novel, which rely little on plot or human characterization for their power.The novel really takes off when Handke puts his protagonist on the "steppes"--which turn out to be the plains of north-central Spain--and has him explore and experience himself in nature.Readers who liked "My Year in the No-Man's Bay" or "Weight of the World" will like this;here are long passages equally evocative and magical.Undoubtedly there are significances here that literati will find resonant, and perhaps metaphorical parallels that students of European politics will identify, but as an exploration into consciousness, into human interactions with nature and time and memory, this small novel delivers an experience that is very satisfying indeed.
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Product DescriptionA collection of three superb essays from a renowned prose stylist attempts to explore how language can work its magic on us, as the author meditates on subjects ranging from his Austrian boyhood to the music of the Beatles. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Asks the question if a perfect day really exists.
I'v read this book not so long ago and I was stunned. It was like looking at painting being slowly painted in front of you. It's also one of thoserare books you just HAVE to read more yhan once. I think it's one of thefew rare wonderfull books I've read.

The successful day, the most beautyful daydream I ever read.
The successful day...as we will never find him. The question is: could westand it?
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On the outskirts of a northwestern European riverport city lives a powerful woman banker, a public figure admired and hated in equal measure, who has decided to turn from the worlds of high finance and modern life to embark on a quest. Having commissioned a famous writer to undertake her Â"authenticÂ" biography, she journeys through the Spanish Sierra de Gredos and the region of La Mancha to meet him. As she travels by allterrain vehicle, bus, and finally on foot, the nameless protagonist encounters five way stations that become the stuff of her biography and the biography of the modern world, a world in which genuine images and unmediated experiences have been exploited and falsified by commercialization and by the voracious mass media.

In this visionary novel, Peter Handke offers descriptions of objects, relationships, and events that teach readers a renewed way of seeing; he creates a wealth of images to replace those lost to convention and conformity. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is also a very human book of yearning and the ancient quest forlove, peopled with memorable characters (from multiple historical periods) and imbued with Handke's inimitable ability to portray universal, inner-worldly adventures that blend past, future, present, and dreamtime.

Great Book - Extremely Poor Translation
As an native English speaker who also speaks German, I read this book first in German and then attempted to read it in English.I could not; I was overwhelmed by the lousy translation.Handke has been mostly translated up to now by the finest translator from the German language into English, Ralph Manheim.This book has been mis-translated by someone else and is not worth a moment of your time.Wait for a correct interpretation.

Four stars for Cymbeline?
In reading and enjoying Handke's work I've been in good company:he's been shortlisted for a Nobel a few times (his politics may make that award an impossibility now) and Harold Bloom considered him one of the "writers of the century"in The Western Canon.True to his supposed avant-gardist status, his styles and forms have been Protean, but common threads in many (Weight of the World, My Year in the No-Man's Bay, On a Dark Night...), this one included, play up his remarkable powers of observation in nature, his subtle and meticulous identification of the connections between outer world and inner consciousness.His style in these has been a "seemingly casual tone, in which every word bears indispensible weight" (Kai Maristed) creating "..a kind of associative philosophical meditation that both maps and manifests the movements of mind."(Sven Bikerts)

I'm personally uncomfortable with the term avant-garde;I prefer to think the very best writers, from Joyce and Proust to the late Gilbert Sorrentino, are not only great craftsmen but formal innovators,re-inventing fiction and pressing language into service it simply hadn't performed before.Gauguin averred that if art isn't revolutionary, it's not art;whatever your definitions, literary art in its most vibrant forms needn't be further labeled. At any rate, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is both typical, easily recognizable Handke and something new and full of surprises,recalling Chaucer and maybe Swift and Cervantes.Even paragraph by paragraph, there is a playful stylistic richness of invention.I was baffled by some passages, even extended passages--some seemingly satiric episodes escaped me entirely--but I was enraptured or delighted by others.

It is a testament to the power of this writer that, even though I have several books now waiting to be read that are surely excellent--short stories by Edward P. Jones, John Williams' Stoner,Solnit's Storming the Gates of Paradise, Seidel's Ooga-Booga,they all will probably be a step down from Handke.

So there may be some unevenness in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, representing an attempt that's not fully successful, but Handke is Handke.Cymbeline can be regarded as inferior only in comparison with other Shakespeare plays, and Handke needn't be made to compete with himself. With apologies to the new translation of Pomuk's Black Book, even slightly-flawed Handke may be the best thing I read all year.So five stars.

Classic Handke
Once described as an author whose goal was to write in a completely different manner than his last book, Handke now produces a text that is typically, predictably unpredictable. A narrative set in timeless-modern-day, Handke crafts a medieval allegory of the pilgrim's journey of self-discovery. Long-time Handke readers will enjoy the twist and turns while readers new to Handke may want to consider an earlier text. Part Ulysses, part Canterbury Tales, all Handke. Not for the fainthearted reader. Enjoy!
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Product DescriptionIn these two remarkable plays, here translated into English for the first time, the renowned Austrian playwright Peter Handke inquires into the boundaries and life-affirming qualities of language. In Voyage, Handke`s characters search not for the right answers but for the right questions, and in The Hour, 400 characters in a city square speak not a word. ... Read more

Product DescriptionShort Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke’s novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America—from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything’s spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life—or the corpse of an old one—lying just around the corner. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Farewell
Since 1999, NYRB Classics has brought back into print a series of under appreciated works in handsome paperback editions.Their website asks readers to suggest out of print books that should again be accessible.Through NYRB, I have found pleasant surprises like Stoner, Ebenezer Le Page and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.I have also have been disappointed with entries such as Boredom, Jakob Van Guten and Short Letter, Long Farewell.

Amazon's summary of this novel suggests a combination of personal introspection and narrative events.There really is very little in the way of plot, however, and I didn't find the nameless protagonist interesting enough, nor his internal dialogue compelling enough, to allow me to recommend the book.The anti-hero comes to America with a Gatsby-like desire to remake himself. He cannot achieve this due to his inability to experience the world outside his mind.He avoids his former wife, leaves his current lover and even refuses to meet his brother after he chances to see the latter defecate in the woods.This is far too quotidian an experience for the nameless one to countenance.

He explains, "In the world I lived in, my dreams were really fantasies, because they had no connection with anything in that world, there was nothing comparable that would have made them possible.As a result, I never became fully conscious of the world around me or my dreams, and that's why I never remember them."

An antidote to this alienation is finally provided in the unlikely person of Director John Ford, who tells the narrator: "I'm only happy when I know exactly what I want.Then I'm so happy I feel as if there were no teeth in my mouth."

The author, however, has little and wants even less.He describes himself as filthy, bedraggled and frazzled and admits, "I had been enjoying all the poses of alienation available to me for too long."These poses are challenging for the reader to endure as well.After a long farewell, I was ready for the simple advice of John Ford.It is doubtful that the unnamed hero has come to feel the same way.

Handke
Sandwiched between 'Goalie's Anxiety...' and 'Sorrow Beyond Dreams,' you couldn't help but think the statute of limitations would make 'Short Letter...' into some kind of 'token disappointment,' added to assure readers that mediocrity wasn't an American patent. How can a writer hit the nail three times?Three varying works with very different and developed themes and separate styles...the more plot-driven 'Goalie,' the nameless (and deceptively endless) wandering narration of an ex-husband, hunted and letting himself be hunted by his ex-wife in 'Short Letter...,' and the almost unspeakable 'Sorrow Beyond Dreams.''Short Letter' is split in two. It contains some of the most stunning prose you will ever catch. Every line reads with revelation and almost escapes the previous build up, but never quite loses the focus of narration, as it seems to want to do. The threads tie themselves as the narrator constantly re-encounters, no matter how far or where he goes, some part of his past, whether its a receipt for money he sent his brother in Oregon, the agave plant which he first encounters in a bar early on on the label of a bottle of tequila, and then later in the desert of Arizona, or his ex-wife, who though in deadly pursuit of him, he at first leaves clues to make sure the pursuit is possible. John Ford movies and then later John Ford himself. Somebody who admits to being 'social' and who needs to be around people to make sure they aren't cutting him or somebody else down (as opposed to the narrator who even with people is more without (or within) than with. Nevertheless, the director is stunned to hear the story the reader has just gone through which involves two solitudes bordering on each other, bordering on disaster itself.Read with caution - you might forget that expectations don't have to be lowered...
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end of a marriage, ridiculously over-dramatized
This is the story of a guy on an aimless road trip, away from a deteriorating marriage and in a meaningless affair that can go nowhere.While the psychology of it is real and sad, I felt that it went over the top by plot twists that made it about as subtle as a Hollywood thriller.As such, it really didn't work for me.The German is OK, but nothing particularly interesting in the style.

The first of Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that Â"portrays theÂ…breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's The StrangerÂ" (Richard Locke, The New York Times). The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by his use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys Â"at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating worldÂ" (Bill Marx, Boston Sunday Globe).

A great page-turner; an unconventional novel.
An excellent psychography of the modern city dweller.An ordinary working man suddenly senses that all his world is falling apart. He "reacts" to this with apathy and the conduction of a murder that has no apparent motive; noattempt is made to rationalize it. All of a sudden, he is a murderer.He then goes on moving from place to place, looking without seeing, focusing on detailsrather thanon meanings. He passivelywaits for what is to come, without really thinking about it. The ending is sublime...
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Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape?, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the “she” in Beckett’s play. This unnamed female similarly recalls other significant women protagonists in Handke’s own work such as The Left-handed Woman. Handke prefaces the monologue in Till Day You Do PartOr a Question of Light with a description of two stone figures. While the male figure remains “as dead and gone as anyone can,” the female bursts into life, and her monologue gradually focuses on Krapp’s use of pauses and language to dominate the other characters in the Beckett play. Ultimately, however, her complaints and critique of Krapp become a declaration of her love for Krapp or at least an affirmation of their attachment, as the two of them are ultimately bound together, perhaps even inseparable.

Till Day You Do Part Or a Question of Light is Handke at his best, evidencing the great skill, psychological acumen, and vision for which his work has been celebrated.

“The David Byrne of fiction: a writer with a resonant, powerfully direct voice who could invoke the particular Sartrean nausea of postmodern existence in the simplest events.”—New York Times

“Handke was and is, one of the most eminent narrative and dramatic writers of postwar Europe.”—Boston Globe

“His prose is reminiscent of the writings of Henry James . . . a passion for understanding, for grasping the tortured complexities of contemporary life.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“In power and vision and range, Peter Handke is the most important new writer on the international scene since Beckett.”—Stanley Kaufmann

“There is no denying Handke’s willful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion. He writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebbles. The best writer, altogether, in his language.”—John Updike, New Yorker

A MODERN MASTER’S WRY AND ENTERTAINING TAKE ON HISTORY’S BEST-KNOWN LOVER

In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his take on the famous seducer. Don Juan’s story—“his own version”—is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke’s Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space.

In this brief and wry volume, Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life.

There have been a number of national reviews of Don Juan
a middling one by Joel Agee in the New York Times Sunday book review in early March of 2010, the best so far is Dan Vitale's at THREE PERCENT

[...]]

Dan Vitale's review of Handke's DON JUAN is a good deal more perceptive than most that have appeared in this country. Nonetheless, he misses a few essential features. Don Juan is but a state of mind, a wish fulfillment into which the restaurateur, who is but a figure out of NO-MAN'S BAY, falls at a moment that he is especially bereft, a moment, it is a dream, a fantasy, and it is so magical in jumping from place to place as a dream or a cut film can be. WOMANTIME is the significant term here that is missed, this is no archetype; Vitale also avoids mention of Don Juan''s sidekick, the chauffeur, who only loves ugly women and whose sex life would seem to be a good deal grosser; also that the book celebrates as the great pop song had it ""what's love got to do with it"".. - bodies enjoying each other's sexuality. It is as earthy as the mushrooms the restaurateur fancies. Formally, the book combines the novelistic, film, dream and the essayistic; the figure that organizes it spatially and narratively are the whirling dervishes. The faster they whirl the calmer the center as the book narrows down and then, once WOMANTIME is over and the TELLING is over, it unravels as does Don Juan back into ordinary counting time. In that sense the book is about aging. The book is about the eros of writing and loving that more than anything else, and is its own demonstration. It is one of Handke's finest and subtlest works, it asks to be read sentence by sentence, at about the pace at which it was written, 1000 words a day, and touches the very dark heart of the world: or rather, as it says: ""brushes is" - and wishes that by merely brushing it represents more accurately. And isn''t it odd that although a certain merriment prevails, is basic mode is rater B-minor, melancholy. The only thing that is complete is the description of the Port Royal abbey region, madre natura on which the restaurateur walks...

Product DescriptionKaspar, Peter Handke's first full-length drama--hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot--is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed.

In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character "speak-ins," Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

an "idiot" in the classical greek sense.
the story of kaspar hauser, the nineteen century autistic child discovered in germany, unable to communicate -- and of his gradual and ultimately tragic re-programming into society, as movingly toldby austrian playwright peter handke. handke became something of a cult figure in the seventies and then fell into disfavor in european cultural circles during the nineties, for his support of the serbs during the bosnian conflict. a fascinating journey into the human condition as kaspar becomes self-aware; by turns dealing with physical pain amidst the panic of alienation and after learning to express himself, replacing physical hurt with emotional (shame). worthwhile reading for folk who don't require car chases in every plot.

Kaspar - sometimes being different is not a good thing
This is possibly the worst book I have ever read. It is a mess of nonsensical sentences! I get it, Kaspar is learning how to speak after being locked up for 16 years (just read an autobiography about the man, there are plenty around)! But Handke beats the point to death (along with many other lines). The story moves so slow (development is slow, granted he's been locked for years, but lets get the story flowing a little quicker!) The story is all over the place and the way the book is set up annoys me to no end.Handke seems like someone who would confuse you with obscure pretentious remarks to prove he is a genius when in reality, hes just a normal person with a few quirks.This has all the pretentions of the art world in writing form.

In closing, there is a reason nothing like this has been done before or since, it simply does not work!

Your original face
Found on the shelves of Book World in New Haven. Seen on the stage in Chicago. And years later in Palo Alto. Read in excerpts often and in entirety every few years.I'm not sure why the play Kaspar has such a hold on me. But it thrills me.

Perhaps because it points back to before my mind was stuffed with concepts. Perhaps because I sense my thoughts are in a rut. I don't know. What words to choose? What choice?

I know no similar work of literature. Wonderful to see performed. Still, the theatrics are only a part of Kaspar's challenge. Why do you think as you do? How much of one's thinking is explanatory fiction? Where did the store of phrases come from? Is it helping?

In some strange attachment, the play Kaspar figures deeply in my self-definition. Foolish, to let a powerful warning about language define me. I don't even think I understand it that well. But long after I have set aside many books, this one continues to challenge and amaze me.

A post-modern play of incredible depth
Kaspar is the kind of play of truly incredible depth that only comes along once in a great while.In my mind it is on the same level as the tragedies of Shakespeare and the Greeks.At first glance, this is a rather pretentious play about language and language aquisition, but it runs much deeper and has all sorts of implications for all sorts of people.If you are at all interested in language, society, psychology, psycho, socio, or antho-liguistics, human development, if you have ever worked with mentally [handicapped] or autistic children, or if you are interested in what it is to be human, check out this play.One caveat, though:One reviewer commented that the play consists of two columns of text designed to be _read_ simultaneously.This is not true, the play is not meant to be read at all, it is meant to be performed.Unless you put considerable energy into penetrating the text, you will get little out of reading it without seeing it performed.The other plays in this volume are also interesting and worth checking out, although a bit self-referential to the theatre.I have heard that the translator has changed the new edition, including altering the title of "Offending the Audience" to "Public Insult" wich, to me, ruins it completely.Anyway, check out this book, but go see a performance if you can.

The Best Play of the Twentieth Century...
...goes to Peter Handke's Kaspar.I first read the play because I had been cast in the show, and frankly I thought it was another psudo-intellectual work intended only to confuse the audience with bitter attempts at meaning through poetry which, at the time, I had seen and worked on all too much of.Kaspar was different.Seven years later, I'm still reflecting on the experience I had with that text, re-reading it, discovering new things, and marveling at the genius of Peter Handke in every regard.I have never known any contemporary playwright to be so didactic yet at the same time so evocative.Most writers with this kind of material just dish out a pile of footnotes in dialogue form.Handke does neither; rather, he paints many unseen facets of profound themes surrounding socialization, language development, and object recognition, to name a few.The way Handke deals with concepts of learning and how we take a typical learning process for granted is illuminating in ways that no theory book or psychology text can offer - and shouldn't that really be the point of theatre?To offer the audience something they can't get anywhere else?

This is a directors play, an actors play, even a designer's play - but most triumphantly it is Handke's play.I can think of few writers outside Shakespeare who can manage to leave so much to those producing the work while still leaving an indelible thumbprint on the final product.My only lament is that the english language is deprived of a writer of this magnitude.
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A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records -- both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations -- the details of Handke's daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977. Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death.

Optimal Handke
Ostensibly a year's worth of notes from the writer's journal, consisting of personal reflections and diurnal observations of the author's life andenvironment, this book can also be construed as a novel in the form of ajournal, and as such, a work of genuine innovation.Handke's miniaturiststyle lends itself perfectly to these discrete entries, each a completedessay or prose poem;the book is a perfect match of temperament and form,and arguably Handke's finest work to date.Some entries speak to the powerof language--even in translation--to evince startlingly fresh images oftime-worn subjects, e.g., trees in wind;others transform the banalitiesof contemporary experience, e.g., the sound of the television from aneighboring house, suburban detritus, etc., into indelible literary images. These are not rough notes but polished paragraphs in Handke's fineststyle.Though this book is a gift to readers with small amounts of freetime or short attention spans, it has a de facto dramatic structure,central to which is the author's confinement in a hospital and relationshipas a single father to his son.The work is, finally, moving as well aseloquent.

This book made Harold Bloom's Western Canon as one of theachievements of the century;it's one of the few I have read twice. Except for his controversial politics, Handke has tended to be overlookedin this country, but he deserves the attention of everyone who considershim/herself a serious reader.I consider Weight of the World optimalHandke.
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Product DescriptionProvocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy.

The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,” identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that Cézanne painted again and again. Finally, “Child Story” is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father—not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman—and his love for his growing daughter. ... Read more

Product DescriptionAn account of a few hours in a writer's life, describing both what he sees and what he observes. The author's previous novels include "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" and "The Left-Handed Woman". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great little Handke!
Great little prose musings by Handke. One of his most accesible books. Needles to praise that hector among the translators, the one and only Ralph Manheim (of the L.F.Céline's fame,among others). I will just quote one thought from this brilliant Austrian maverick writer: "What he had written that day was irrelevant and meaningless; he should have never written it, for to write was criminal; to produce a work of art, a book, was presumption, more damnable than any other sin."
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A collective work of outstanding literary scholarship
Compiled, edited, and co-authored by David N. Coury (Associate Professor of German and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay) and Frank Pilipp (Professor of German in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology), The Works Of Peter Handke: International Perspectives offers readers an expansively interpretive understanding of the established theatrical, poetic, and essay writings of poet, playwright and author Peter Handke. Contributors explore Peter Handke's various works through acute and precise detailings and analysis ranging from his prose and novels, to the literary significance of his German poetry with praisable accuracy and articulate conceptual comprehension. A collective work of outstanding literary scholarship, The Works Of Peter Handke is very strongly recommended personal reading lists and academic library reference collections.
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